


Nonviolent Conflict Resolution in the Jurassic Period

by SylvanWitch



Category: Primeval
Genre: Dinosaurs, M/M, Trapped in time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-19
Updated: 2018-12-19
Packaged: 2019-09-22 12:55:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,585
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17060183
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SylvanWitch/pseuds/SylvanWitch
Summary: They were stuck in the middle of the Jurassic period with no expectation of rescue, which seemed like a fine time for them to finally have it out over the whole Helen thing.  Fortunately for Stephen, Cutter's idea of conflict resolution is decidedly non-Jurassic.





	Nonviolent Conflict Resolution in the Jurassic Period

**Author's Note:**

> For the prompt: "Stuck in the middle."
> 
> Please note: I'm new to this fandom, and I've only seen up to S2ep4. Let's pretend this happens sometime around the beginning of Season 2, then, may we?

“Really? We’re doing this now?”

Cutter’s voice was a familiar combination of exasperated and fond that Stephen was surprised to discover he’d missed. There hadn’t been so much fondness lately.

Granted, the man had a point: They were stuck in the middle of the Jurassic period with no expectation of rescue.

Still…

“Are we likely to get another chance?” he answered mildly. He put on the jaded tone he knew Cutter disliked, hoping to push him past his vaunted threshold for sarcastic deflection and into a genuine reaction.

“So, what, you want to talk about our feelings and hug it out?” 

Stephen could see how Cutter and Helen had gotten along. She might be more inclined to exploit the bodies around her, but Cutter could peel the skin from a person’s soul without even breaking a sweat. He’d gone through fourteen research assistants in four years when Stephen had volunteered for the job.

His mates had hosted a farewell party for him the night before he’d started the job.

“For those about to die…” he murmured, half recalling that beer-hazed night and half appreciating the lethality of their current condition.

“Oh, shut up,” Cutter answered, but he snorted that bitter little laugh he was so good at, and Stephen had to hide his own smile: His plan was working.

Of course, when he’d planned the Great Showdown, as he’d come to think of it in the privacy of his own crowded skull, they’d been sharing pints at some anonymous pub, traded verbal jabs, taken it all out to the back alley, and settled it the way these things usually got settled.

None of his scenarios had involved T. Rexes. Or whatever the hell was making the ground shake and his ears bleed with its deafening challenge.

“Allosaurus,” Cutter muttered, breath hot against Stephen’s ear as he leaned in close to be heard over the ongoing racket just beyond their ersatz cover, which was a cramped, low declivity only tall enough for them to lay side by side on their bellies, shoulders brushing, facing outward to whatever danger would come.

Stephen had lost his gun when they’d fled the hungry attention of an enormous pterosaur, but he didn’t think it would matter much anyway: They were a mile from the anomaly they’d come through, their detector had broken when Cutter had fallen on it while diving out of the way of a small herd of iguanodons, and since they’d come to this period illicitly, they had precious little hope of a rescue.

In fact, “Too bad only Helen knows we’re here,” Stephen said. As segues went, it was a pretty good one…if he wanted to raise a reaction, which, see above, re: Yes. He had no intention of dying in the distant, stinking past without at least clearing the air between them.

“Aye,” Cutter answered, accent thickening, as it often did when he wanted to shut down further avenues of conversation. 

That was it. They were dying any minute now. He didn’t have time to batter his way through Cutter’s impressive defenses.  
“Look, why don’t you just hit me and get it over with.”

“Sure,” Cutter answered in that supremely annoying tone that said he wasn’t really agreeing with your monumentally stupid suggestion, and if you’d taken a half a minute to think your idea through, you’d have not only seen what a great pile of shite it was but how there was a much more sensible solution only a real moron would have overlooked to begin with.

“Then what do you want, Nick? Do you want me to beg? I’m already on my belly.”

“That’s true,” he answered agreeably, as if they were discussing their takeaway choices for that night. “Maybe your back, then.”

Perhaps Stephen’s hearing had been damaged by the recent saurian symphony. Or maybe all the time travel had finally driven him mad. Because it sounded a lot like Nick Cutter had just suggested something…really interesting, actually, but totally out of character, and Stephen was fairly certain he’d misheard.

Or misunderstood.

Certain, that is, until Nick slid just that bit closer so that what had been necessary touching turned to quite unnecessary but completely welcome full body contact—at least from the points of their shoulders to their hips and then their booted feet.

“Look, the truth is, I like you a lot more than I liked Helen—most of the time—and I can’t blame you for falling for her…uh…wiles”—leave it to Cutter to put just the right lilt on it to turn an otherwise innocent word into something blushingly filthy. “—and maybe it’d level the field between us, you know?”

Stephen knew for a fact that Cutter had a string of letters after his name indicating a vast and impressive higher education, none of which was remotely evident in the flimsy excuse he’d just offered.

“You’re saying our having...wiles…would somehow erase my having slept with your wife?”

Not that Stephen had a problem with being propositioned by Cutter, imminent death or no. He’d be lying if he said he’d never given it a thought. But he’d never once thought that Cutter might have had similar thoughts.

“I’m saying I’d like to know what you taste like just once before we die, which seems a more than likely conclusion to our current circumstances.”

“Oh,” Stephen answered, rather faintly, largely because the blood he’d have ordinarily needed for thinking and making words had fled rather precipitately to a point decidedly further south in his anatomy.

And then, because he was, in fact, not remotely the cool, aloof predator he pretended to be during his day job, he said the next thing that came into his head, which was, “I’d imagine I taste a lot like sweat and despair right now.”

“Ah, well, can’t have everything,” Cutter answered, and there was no mistaking the warmth nor the affection in his voice as he leaned toward Stephen with an air of patient biding until Stephen met him part way with a cool press of chapped lips that went on long enough to pass the border of awkward and threaten an invasion of neighboring humiliating when Cutter made an impatient noise, swiped his hot, wet tongue along Stephen’s lower lip, and then deepened the kiss when Stephen opened his mouth instinctively.

From there it was messy, lewd, delicious, and bruising, insofar as their shoulders were jammed against the rock above them and their hands restricted to the tight space between their bodies.

Cutter was a genius, though, which might explain how Stephen found his hard cock in Cutter’s strong, confident grip, Cutter breathing indecipherable words of encouragement into his ear as he nipped at Stephen’s jaw and earlobe and ground against the thigh Stephen had somehow wedged between Nick’s legs to give him leverage.

It was inelegant and graceless and absolutely fucking glorious.

They ended in a panting, sticky mess, the elastic of Stephen’s pants caught under his balls in what was rapidly becoming a problem and Cutter cursing over having come in his own trousers, and he’d do it all again in a heartbeat if it meant hearing Nick’s rueful, fond chuckle and feeling the ghost of a gentle kiss against his cheekbone before there was a cold space between them, enough room for him to attempt to put himself to rights and enough distraction to keep him from freaking out over what they’d just done.

When they were back on their bellies, side by side, looking out at the rapidly darkening world, Nick said, “Thank you,” and Stephen began to say, “For what?” when they heard the distinct sound of twigs snapping under the feet of some approaching predator.

Beside him, Nick froze, and when Stephen spared him a glance, he saw that mingled terror and wonder that always came over Cutter’s face when he was about to see something toothy and impossible.

Stephen could relate, insofar as it was the same expression he often wore when considering seducing Cutter. It struck him that now, at last, he didn’t have to be afraid anymore, not of this, anyway.

The thought brought out a wicked, satisfied grin, which he could feel stretching his face as he turned back to watch whatever it was that wanted to kill them this time.

It was almost anti-climactic to see Helen standing there, her usual top buttons undone, her typical harried expression morphing into something else—confusion, maybe? Uncertainty?—at seeing them together and whole, side by side.

“Having fun?” she sneered, apparently congenitally incapable of the less bitter kinds of small talk.

“We were until you showed up,” Cutter answered, managing to pack a raftload of innuendo into those six simple words.

“Well, don’t let me interrupt, then, only the anomaly won’t hold for more than a half-hour.”

“Coming?” Cutter asked Stephen with enough of a leer to make it single entendre.

“So soon?” Stephen asked, getting into the spirit of the game.

“Well, I’m not as young as I once was,” Cutter answered, eeling his way out of the cavern in a manner that belied his words.

“Experience pays,” Stephen laughed, entirely too happy for someone who could still be eaten by raptors on his way back to the anomaly.

“We’ll see,” Cutter said, and though he was clearly baiting Helen, he also spared Stephen a half-smiling look that suggested they weren’t through with this—them—whatever it was.

“Good,” Stephen answered, hoping they survived to make it home.


End file.
